Faber £20 pp506
Imagine you have a favourite clock that needs checking over, and you are introduced to a charming and affable craftsman who proceeds, while entertaining you with a stream of anecdote and reminiscence, to dismantle it, until it is scattered in tiny pieces all over his shop. Grateful but anxious, you inquire when he is going to put it together again, whereupon he replies with some asperity that he has no intention of doing so, since time is merely a human construct, and the idea of measuring it precisely is illusory. Besides, your belief that his dismantling your clock is the cause of its being in pieces suggests that you have an extremely crude and simplistic notion of causality, which is actually a far more elusive concept than you seem to suppose.
Michael Frayn’s new book is rather like that, only on a much larger scale. For time and causality are by no means the only victims of his erudite, imaginative, funny and dazzlingly clever philosophical inquiry. He unbolts, chapter by chapter, the fabric of the universe. Things that most of us regard as certainties (the laws of science, the dependability of logic) vanish like smoke. It has become apparent, he contends, in the wake of quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, that scientific laws are human artefacts, with no real existence outside our statement of them. Logic is just a system we have made up, not an inherent condition of the natural world. The universe itself is our invention. All its characteristics exist only as figments of the human brain. Without us it would have no characteristics at all, and so would not exist.
The obvious objections to this position Frayn anticipates and dismisses with acrobatic agility. Mathematicians, for example, might protest that number must always have existed, irrespective of whether anyone was present to do the counting. On the contrary, Frayn responds, number is something we have imposed on the natural world. To claim that nature is “doing mathematics” when particles combine or separate would be ridiculous, and to say that number must always have been present in principle, waiting to be discovered, would be like saying that bubble gum or the works of Shakespeare were always present in principle.
Besides, before you count anything — sheep, say — you must have decided they have enough in common to be grouped together for counting, and this depends on our human ability to see analogies, which has allowed us to invent an ordered world, and language in which to describe it. You cannot have a word “sheep” until you see one sheep is like another. Of course, analogies are themselves just constructs, with no real existence. No sheep is identical with another sheep, and anything can be like anything else according to the pressure of our purposes. You may say I am a sheep (dimwitted, easily led) and the statement will become part of the enormous delusive fabric of metaphor that our analogy-making brains create. What we call understanding the world is really a haphazard game of imagined similarities.
A key component of Frayn’s thought is the idea that everything is infinitely various. “Open your eyes at random and you are looking at more than could be described in a thousand years and more than could be explained in a million.” Human perception reads meaning into what we see, and does so by deleting most of it. This is what Frayn has against causality. To claim one thing is the cause of another is to ignore the vast, expanding cone of other antecedent events, going right back to the Big Bang, which might equally be claimed as causes. To cram all this confusion into the simple “guilty” or “not guilty” of the courtroom is as insane as religious fundamentalism. People often cling to a vague idea that if every single antecedent event were known everything would be found to be locked together in a chain of cause and effect. But this, for Frayn, is mere superstition, like belief in a benevolent deity. Underlying all material existence is the behaviour of subatomic particles, which is random.
Randomness seems a more likely answer than order or design, in Frayn’s view, to most of the big questions. Life itself has evolved through random mutation, and modern astrophysics sees the development of the galaxies as random events. Mental life, too, may be random. How do we have ideas or make decisions? Examination of his own thought processes leaves Frayn in the dark. He finds it impossible to watch himself having thoughts, or tell where they come from. “My thoughts think themselves”, it seems. Brain operation may depend on the random behaviour of single particles, so that what we call “free will” may be free but cannot be will. Other people are, of course, even more difficult to observe than ourselves. To have any conception of them we have to reconstruct them as fictions. Fiction writers, Frayn fears, may have a lot to answer for in this respect, because in their stories other people’s motives and intentions are knowable, which tempts us to think they are knowable in life, sometimes with lethal results.
Not that he seems deterred from fiction. No philosophical treatise, surely, has ever been so alive with stories as The Human Touch. Its hypotheses and thought experiments throw up shoals of characters who get impatient with being teaching-aids and set off refreshingly on adventures of their own. We keep diving, too, into Frayn’s past — a horrific car crash he once witnessed; his student days in Moscow, where a friend rigged up an electric random-choice machine, which they gambled on in kopecks; a mad correspondent in his journalist days who wanted him to found a Universal Brotherhood of All Mankind Association, and so inadvertently gave Frayn the word “uboama”, meaning a grandiose illusion.
Grandiose illusions he demolishes in passing, with much hilarity and splinter-sharp intelligence, include Chomsky’s theory, unquestioningly accepted by most linguists, that the human brain is “hard-wired” for language, the philosophical belief in parallel universes, and the possibility of developing computers with feelings and consciousness, indistinguishable from human beings. What, he pertinently asks, would be the point, since we can produce creatures indistinguishable from human beings with the rudimentary means already at our disposal?
He sometimes slips. Arguing the case for total subjectivity does not really permit him to say that quantum mechanics gives us “a truer picture of the universe” than we had before, for true pictures of the universe are uboamas. His claim that humans create the universe — “if we go, so will everything” — entails, he concedes, a contradiction, for the universe existed for 14 billion years before we arrived, and will continue exactly as before after we have disappeared. But if, as he argues, our consciousness gives it all its characteristics, it must exist, after we have gone, without any characteristics, which seems a mystical state of affairs, although he rejects mysticism. However, this looks less like a mistake on Frayn’s part than an illustration of the limit of human understanding — a topic never far from your consciousness in this mind-stretching book.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £18 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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Comprehensive guide to philosophy, with articles, biography and further reading
